The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
by Antonio Damasio
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Book Summary Information
Author: Antonio DamasioEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2000-10-10
ISBN: 0156010755
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Harvest Books
Book Reviews of The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
Book Review: Neither a clear writer nor a clear thinker
Summary: 1 Stars
I have just finished reading this book with a great sense of relief. I wish I could agree with all the complimentary things that other reviewers have written about it, but I find I can't. I am convinced that Damasio is an insightful neurologist, and his personal observations and extensive knowledge of patients with neurological conditions is valuable. However, he is neither a clear thinker nor a clear writer. He goes in for the poetic and artistic, and while his language may sound great, more than half the time I didn't know what the Hell he was actually trying to say. Here's an example: I literally opened the book at random and chose the first sentence I came on: "Knowing springs to life in the story, it inheres in the newly constructed neural pattern that constitutes the nonverbal account." If you think the meaning of that sentence would be clearer after you had read all the book that preceded it, you're wrong. I have read the entire book, and I still have only a vague idea what Damasio is trying to say here. When he is not being poetic, Damasio is technical. A card-carrying neuroscientist myself, I nevertheless struggled to understand some of Damasio's jargon.
More disturbing than the lack of clear expression was the lack of clear thinking. Damasio is often illogical and often contradicts himself. For instance, late in the book, he states, "The idea that the nature of subjective experience can be grasped effectively by the study of their behavioral correlates is wrong." In most of the chapters that precede this statement, however, he does exactly that. He describes what he supposes to be the subjective experience of neurological patients based on his observations of their behavior. He confidently states over and over again that this patient is conscious and that one is not, without ever clearly saying how he knows -- without defining the criteria on which he bases that judgment.
Perhaps I was spoiled, because just before reading this book I read Daniel Dennett's _Consciousness Explained_. The ideas in that book were intrinsically much more difficult to grasp, but they were stimulating, insightful, and expressed in a way that was both engaging and clear. I was sorry to reach the end of it. Reading Damasio, in contrast, was a punishment I forced myself to endure, and whose cessation is a relief.
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